COLUMN: Who’s Wayne Gretzky?
My position as Mr. Un-Athletic is threatened by a hostile takeover.
I always knew this day would come. I was pretty sure one day some guy would approach me and claim he was more un-athletic than I am. But what I wasn’t prepared for was a mutiny from within the Statesman staff.
Meet Emma.
Emma Tippets is the features editor of The Utah Statesman. I got my first taste of Emma this August as she immediately launched into a tirade on how she hated sports, claiming it to be the most pointless waste of time ever. This was a direct assault on my ego – and then Emma made some stupid comment about sports. Suddenly I felt vindicated.
Throughout this semester, I’ve sat next to Emma and heard her make ridiculous comments about sports. Not too long ago she was telling me how she was sitting at a USU basketball game and talking to a friend about how to scrapbook the basketball season. What?!? I couldn’t believe it. The Spectrum is a sanctuary from highly girly things like scrapbooking. A scrapbook has no place in a basketball game, but that’s Emma for you.
The other day it dawned on me, “She’s going to take your title. You might think you’re un-athletic, but she’s got you beat hands-down.”
Suddenly I started to panic. I worked long and hard – mostly by not working long or hard – to become Mr. Un-Athletic, and I was not about to let anybody take that title from me.
But as much as I hate to admit it, Emma truly deserves the title Mr. Un-Athletic, except that she’s female, so she’ll have to settle for the title Ms. Un-Athletic. Now before anybody gets upset, let me illustrate some prime examples of Emma’s knowledge of the sporting world.
Just before Thanksgiving, Emma ran up to me full of excitement to tell me she had a Mr. Un-Athletic idea for me. I started to get excited because she was excited and asked her what the idea was. She told me I should go shopping the day after Thanksgiving and fight the crowds. She had the audacity to claim shopping is a sport.
Now, I know many women consider this a sport, and I will agree, in the same sense that we consider weak sports like golf and baseball sports. Granted, shopping the day after Thanksgiving takes a deal of athleticism, but just because you put your body in harm’s way, does not qualify it as a sport.
Ms. Un-Athletic thinks at least one team in the NFL needs to have pink on their jerseys. There’s something to be said about choosing good uniform colors. Just look at the Cleveland Browns; bad colors equal bad football team. Yes, there is correlation.
When asked to name five NBA teams, she listed off three legitimate teams and I was pretty impressed until she continued, “The Seattle Sunhawks? The Harlem Globetrotters?”
I asked her to tell me the times when each professional sport held their championship game. She got the Super Bowl right only because she knows that around that time her family suddenly makes really good food. Her response to the NBA championship was, “In March, because of March Madness right?” I just shook my head in disbelief.
Finally I asked about the Stanley Cup. She looked all confused and said, “The Stanley Cup, is that tennis?” As I laughed she said, “I don’t care, I’m not Canadian.” She has a valid point. But, while hockey is not the biggest sport in America, it is still an important sport to know about. She seemed to struggle with this one the most though.
When I asked her which sport Wayne Gretzky played, she told me baseball. I asked her what the icing penalty was and she told me it was when a player stopped suddenly and sprayed ice in another players face.
As you can see, she deserves the title Ms. Un-Athletic. However, I was surprised about how much sports knowledge she actually did know. She watches football on a regular basis and can hold a decent conversation about the pigskin. She said she first started to do this to support a guy in his passion for the sport, but over time, she developed a knowledge and love for the game.
After close review, I’ve decided Emma is the new Ms. Un-Athletic. And as much as I find humor in what little she knows about sports, I am always impressed with how much she knows about just about everything else. She is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, and will be graduating next week and heading off to the nation’s capitol and going to law school.
While she might not be filled with volumes of sporting knowledge, she does know more than most girls I know and doesn’t sound stupid when talking about the things she does know. As she heads off on a new stage of life, I feel it my duty to officially give her the title of Ms. Un-Athletic and wish her good luck. She will be missed at The Statesman.
Seth Hawkins is a sophomore majoring in public relations and wishes people wouldn’t steal the one thing he is good at – being un-athletic. He can be reached at sethhawkins@cc.usu.edu